


Skylarks of the Steppe

by historia_vitae_magistras



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: F/F, Post Cold War, this fic is twat snorkeling some feelings and shit load of paprika
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-30 16:02:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12112245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historia_vitae_magistras/pseuds/historia_vitae_magistras
Summary: It's 1995. Katya has given up her nuclear queen in the international chess game and Erzse has finally built herself a place to call home. They baptise it properly.Oneshot. Complete.





	Skylarks of the Steppe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [katuman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katuman/gifts).



The letter comes the winter after she gives up her nuclear power. Her head and heart are heavy with her plummeting economy and she’s colder than normal that winter, her hands thinner and her coat a little looser. But that’s fine. She has a chance. Her spine is straighter, her head held higher because god, she’s free. She’s really and truly free. She’s had notices from the west, offers of aid and two letters from her sister. Natalya stays close to their brother, no matter what. And the SSRs might be gone, but to Natalya, family is family. She's always been just as happy to speak Russian as Belarusian. But not Katya. Her mouth will always round out to her own smoother language more elegantly than it will ever in Russian. Besides, the Russians always know her own people by that goddamn hard G sound she softens, folding it into the rest of the word like flour into dough. But when the letter comes, it’s in Ukrainian. Shitty Ukrainian, but Ukrainian nonetheless. It very, very cordially invites her to a weekend in a lake house on Lake Balaton and offers company and pickled goods. 

Tucked into the folds of the letter, there’s a train ticket from Kyiv to Budapest and a travel voucher from Budapest to the lake. It’s signed, ‘Yours in companionship, Erzsébet’ and comes stamped with a green, white and red flag with a gaping circle in the heart. She smiles at that and pens a reply she proudly stamps with her new blue and yellow. She has a month to knit as many Carpathian wool socks as she can manage. 

As the days go by, she trades one of her brother’s pilfered lengths of pipes to the old farmer up the way for bottle of honey and chile horilka. The chiles, Turkish, are worth more than that by themselves, but the old farmer remembers her. He addresses her formally, nods with the Lazarenko. They had joked, before, that God himself must have been steering her forward with his fist on her collar. She doesn’t tell him the liquor is for the woman who had ridden on the back of the Panzers that had accompanied the Germans in ‘41. She doesn’t think of that, really, not with Erzsé. She thinks about steppe horse lords and the might they'd brought and the impermanence they represented. Thinks of cossacks and gold braiding on red tunics and swords through the throats of German speaking soldiers. Erzsé had been in agreement of that much in 1945. But oh, those good years in the Carpathians. She remembers chases on horseback through narrow mountain passes and enough Ottoman pistols within reach she could get 10 shots off in a fight if she was quick.

She thinks about the hips under those bandoliers of turkish pistols as she takes the train west. It charges into the open field, into only half remembered distances. She has her good hat on, the rounded one with the rabbit’s fur that Ivan had gifted to her for New Years 1987 and the matching blue coat with the wheat-yellow liner she’d sewn inside like her own personal little secret. Her own colors nearest her heart. She has a case with the basket of socks, less than she might have liked but finer than some of her previous attempts and her second best outfit. She’s wearing the nicest, the suit with the slacks that Natalya had only re-hemmed twice to fit her. Her sister might be taller with a body better for ballet, but Katya had sewn those trousers with enough extra fabric the first time with the knowledge they would come back to her and her wider hips in their perpetual cycle of re-use. They make her look taller, de-emphasise her hips and show off her rear. She’s proud of her ass. It’s a little flatter now, with the times what they are, but she’s put the work in for it.

Erzsé greets her with a smile and the three kisses on alternating cheeks like an old friend. And in a way, Katya supposes, they are indeed old friends. It’s a short walk from where the bus drops her off to the lakehouse. Its built like a Swiss Chateau, with blossoms everywhere and embroidery on every conceivable surface. Cluttered and homey and new in a way houses haven’t been in a long, long time.

It’s a day of small talk and catching up and light reminiscing and a night in separate beds before they up-end dual shots of the chile-vodka down their throats the next night. Erzsé kisses her then. Finally, blessedly kisses her then and drags her down the doily laden sofa. They spend the afternoon down there. Erzsé’s mouth between her thighs and then Katya’s mouth between hers, breasts free of shirts, breasts on velvet warmed by the fireplace. Her hips rock. When Erzsé pulls her to her feet, they weave serpentine lines in slow rolling thrusts as she moves, tan and full beneath the slim of her waist. She watches them work under the Erzsé’s robe falls around her and they’re stepping into a hot room. She feels her hair curl up around her ears, the bob she’s worn since the fall of the empire giving way to the humidity. Erzsé gets the rest of her clothes off, her shirt and slacks falling to the floor. 

“I’ll wash them before you go,” she says with a smile and leads her by the hand to the shallow pool of water. Mist rolls off it in luridly attractive waves. It feels so good to be warm and fed even if it's with paprika-laden chicken that will probably kill her liver. She almost feels her lymph nodes for changes from the death-peppers but Erzsé kisses her knuckles then. Laves attention and kisses to her breasts, leading her further into the pool, where finally, finally Erzsé kisses her mouth. 

The kiss is unbearably good, a spike of sensation. Erzsé’s strong shoulders a heaving frame of want beneath Katya’s hands. Everything Katya thinks about who she is, what she is, is irrelevant. There are no words, only sensation, smooth exploding wonderful sensation. But still, somehow, the locking of their mouths is tender and moving, like the shift of earth. Katya feels powerful, suddenly stoned. Erzse is kissing her. She is kissing Erzse. She is kissing the woman who invaded her not a half century ago. She is kissing the woman she liberated not a half century ago. They are standing on the edge of the pool, giving and getting every kiss they’ve ever gotten or given; kissing from memory. Kissing: fast, hard, deep, frantic, long and slow. They taste the others lips, mouth, the tongue. Not ash this time, not blood. She tastes like the paprika dish and hazelnut cake they’d just eaten. Erzsé lifts her easily up onto the wood and sitting above her, Katya puts her hands to Erzse’s face, the softness of Erzse’s skin; the absence of the rough scratch of a stale shave is so unfamiliar as to seem impossible. Erzse rubs her face against Katya’s as she kisses a line up her cheekbone — sweeping the cheek, the high bones, muzzling the ear, the narrow line of the eyebrow, finishing with a butterfly flick of the lashes.

 

Erzse is at her breast. A noise escapes Katya, an embarrassingly deep sigh. Katya can’t believe that Erzsé can even bother. She’s smaller than ever, a proud scrapper without her brother. There is no money, her economy in freefall and her home in shambles. But there is her blue and her yellow. Her fields, her earth. Her sky, her hope. She’s got something wonderful coming in to these years. Without her brother, there will be something wonderful in these years come. She is free. She will be free in these years to come. Erzsé pauses, whispers to ask if she’s alright. But Christ, Katya’s not stopping it, she’s not screaming no. Erzsé would stop, if she said no. So she says yes. She says yes and she enjoys it. 

And oh god, is she’s enjoying it. Erzse kisses Katya’s belly, tonguing places no one’s touched in this century. Katya reaches for Erzsé, finds breast, pressing, kneading thumbing. Erzsé’s tongue goes lower, her fingers find something better. Katya’s knees buckle, she collapses back. Erzse splashes into the water but keeps her hand. It’s a graceful thing, wheat giving way to wind. When she’s standing again, Erzsé doesn’t stop kissing. She makes her mouth work in a rhythm as punchy and wonderful as the sharp notes of Hej Sokoly. Good Lord, Erzse is smooth and not exactly soft but not hard like a man. She runs her hands along the lines of Erzsé. No, Erzsé may fight and stand with the best soldiers of Europe be she is nothing like a man. She is not a mass of steel and, a jumble of abrasion from beard to prick. Between her legs is even smoother, enveloping like the accordion music itself. Drawing her up with strength she forgets she has. 

Erzse spreads herself out over Katya, skin to skin, breast to breast. Erzse against her, ripe, full, wonderful. She almost screams — it’s like a living thing — tongue and teeth and throat. And Erzse is on top, grinding against Katya, humping her in the best prickless pose. Fucking that’s all friction. Fucking that is all friction and woman. Nothing of man, nothing of war. Just woman and peace and freedom.

They are two full-grown, thousand year women. Katya has been sister to empires, Erzsé has been wife to more. A thick scent rises, a sexual being of its own right that joins them right there, on the floor. Because that scent is the same as when men fuck women. All want and musk. Erzse’s fingers curl between Katya’s legs, slipping in. She eases in and out more quickly, more vigorously, she swirls her tongue around Katya’s breast, laving lines of sensation across her nipple. Erzsé breathes over the damp skin, buries her head between Katya’s breasts and whorls her fingers left. 

Katya comes in a convulsive shiver, filled with a flooding sensation, as though a seal has broken; her hips in seizures, and her thighs squeeze. And just as she thinks it’s over, as she starts to relax, Erzse’s mouth slides south, and Katya is stuck at the summit of sensation, her body stopped cold by the flick of Erzse’s tongue. She lies splayed out on the wood. They concentrate together, Katya concentrating on trying to figure out exactly what Erzse is doing. Every lick, every flick causes an electric surge, a tiny sharp shock, to flash through her body. Erzsé focusing on doing her best to kill Katya with only her tongue. 

She sees flashes of light, fleeting images. It’s as though she’s losing consciousness, losing her mind, dying. She can’t bear any more — it’s too much. Erzsé seems to sense her stiffening, because she looks up, replaces her mouth with fingers and pulls back a little. Less intensity pulls Katya back to relaxation. Erzsé takes her hand, peppers it with with kisses. 

“Too much?” 

“A little?” 

“Has anyone ever done that before?” 

She rolls her eyes. She’s centuries old, maybe even older than Erzsé. She remembers Athena herself, Greece and her Roman lover. She lives at the crux of Europe and the East. Trapped between the Ottomans and her brother. Oh, Sadik, she’d hated him, but life with him in it had been better in ways it had never been with only her brother or Toris and Feliks. A man who thought of her as a woman, not as the kind sister. A man who looked at her as a woman and not purely at other men. She thought back to a man’s unshaven face under a sheer curtain, of her legs opening and shaking under their mouth, of being consumed—- consumed in a way that that was exquisite but brutal. 

“Yes, but not quite like that,” 

“Not by a woman, you mean?” 

There had been women before. One in particular she remembers more than others. Dark curly hair, golden breasts and a young face there, sliding between her knees to finger and fuck her. But so young a face, a mortal face that had, mere decades later, crumbled to bone dust and rot in her many fertile plains, joining her motherland for once and for all in a complete, irrevocable way she could not no matter how hard they fucked on that bed in Sevastopol. 

They, the nations, exist because of men and women like that, so short lived. They live such short lives and such intense lives. Her own especially prone to the old songs and old histories that keep those parts of her that are bone dust and flesh rot alive in a way. They make her what she is, all that death under her rolling fields. But nations she could fuck like this? There are so few of them, fewer still she could fuck. Czechia and Hungary who had always prefered to look west. Belgium, Liechtenstein and Monaco and their brothers. There was Taiwan and Vietnam far to the east. 

“Humans. The odd encounter with you and Czechia. But you’ve never— not like that,”

“I should think I’ve learned a thing or two since we were children fighting over farmsteads.” Erzsé said like she was pleased with herself. 

“Where on earth could you learn that?” 

She laughed, the source of her amusement a mystery, but her eyes were heavy with a sort of nostalgia. “Ah, the age of empires,” 

“When you were married?”

She snorted. “As if Roderick has ever touched a cunt in his life,” 

“You were allowed—” 

“Whatever I wanted, yes. So long as it didn’t speak German.” 

“You were always… fond of him, weren’t you.” She thinks of that pale Prussian wraith with his sandy swampland so worthless they had stolen her own soil in trucks. She thinks of his brother who had come with a smile and been greeted with a wreath of kisses and flowers. She looks at Erzse, who has had so many, and wonders if she's ever loved him. 

Erzsé laughed again, her high sparkling laugh but this time it’s brittle and as false as fool’s gold. “Fond? Sometimes, perhaps.” 

“Oh.” Is all Katya says. She wonders if it’s something like her finding Sadik so attractive when she’s particularly furious with her brother. Erzsé doesn’t let her say anything more. She’s rearing up again. 

“Fond of this,” She slid down, aiming her face south. She bit a kiss into Katya’s thigh.“Fonder still of you, if I may continue.” 

Katya nods and braces herself against the pool wall, as happy as she’s ever been.

**Author's Note:**

> Title riffed off the Ukrainian folk song "Hej, Sokoly." Edited and researched by the amazing Katuman who is as indispensable to this fandom as air is to mankind.
> 
> I'm on Tumblr here: https://historia-vitae-magistras.tumblr.com/
> 
> I post history and Hetalia and aesthetics.
> 
> Kudos, comments and critiques are life. Thank you for reading!!!


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